Fantasy Space

Alphonso Lingis
Pennsylvania State University

Dignity for Immanuel Kant is a practical concept. In the practicable field of our
action, where everything we envision is a means exchanged for a good, and where goods
once attained are means for further goods, there would be an end that is not a means for
anything further, an unexchangeable good. This end Kant names a dignity. It gives a
unilateral direction to the movements from means to ends.

The rational faculty, our rational faculty, is such an end for Kant. Our faculty of
thought finds itself from the first subject to an imperative, to conceive concepts
correctly and reason rightly, to conceive things with coherent concepts and relate them
consistently. Thought is subject to the imperative for the universal and the necessary,
for law. The sense of being subject to the imperative is the feeling of respect. What we
respect in our rational faculty is the imperative for law that commands in it. But then
our rational faculty must command our sensory-motor faculties, so as to perceive things
and explore them such that they can be conceived with consistent concepts. Our rational
faculty must make of our sensory and motor faculties, and the things of our environment,
not the means for its constitution but the means for the exercise of its dominion. Thus
our rational faculty is the end for which our sensory and motor faculties are means, but
it is not itself a means for anything further.

For Kant respect for another is respect for the imperative for law that rules in
another. The other figures as an exemplar of law-regulated perception and action that
binds oneself also. And in practice one knows that the maxim for one's own action is
rational if it can be universalized for all agents acting in a like situation. Thus we
respect persons inasmuch as they are exemplary, inasmuch as in their speech they
formulate and in their actions they diagram what is necessary for everyone.

Recent ethical thinking has instead sought to validate respect for agents in their
individuality. Martin Heidegger distinguishes between the thought generalized in the
language of a culture and the authentic thought that formulates the individuality of
real things and situations. What one says--what everyone, anyone says--and what anyone
who is fully rational says, concerns the general and recurrent lines of things and
situations. But there is something irreducibly singular about the layout of things I
perceive about me, and about the tasks that beckon to me and the implements that answer
to my own powers. What I respect is what I myself can become. What I respect in others
is the radius of implements and tasks that answer to their own singular powers. Bernard
Williams locates individuality in "character," which he defines as the set of intentions
and projects of an individual who, when he acts, acts according to his own desires and
in the contingencies of a situation his own. For these thinkers too dignity is a
practical concept. Slavoj Zizek locates it instead in the fantasy space, intrinsically
bound to the sensual impulses of one's own body, which every individual opens in the
symbolic system and language of his culture.

In his book Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture,
Zizek writes:

... avoid as much as possible any violation of the fantasy space of the other,
i.e., respect as much as possible the other's "particular absolute," the way he
organizes his universe of meaning in a way absolutely particular to him.. Such an
ethic is neither imaginary (the point is not to love our neighbor as ourselves,
insofar as he resembles ourselves, i.e., insofar as we see in him in image of
ourselves) nor symbolic (the point is also not to respect the other on account of the
dignity bestowed on him by his symbolic identification, by the fact that he belongs to
the same symbolic community as ourselves, even if we conceive this community in the
widest possible sense and maintain respect for him "as a human being"). What confers
on the other the dignity of a "person" is not any universal-symbolic feature but
precisely what is "absolutely particular" about him, his fantasy, that part of him
that we can be sure we can never share. To use Kant's terms: we do not respect the
other on account of the universal moral law inhabiting every one of us, but on account
of his utmost "pathological" kernel, on account of the absolutely particular way every
one of us "dreams his world," organizes his enjoyment....

Fantasy as a "make-believe masking a flaw, an inconsistency in the symbolic order,
is always particular--its particularity is absolute; it resists "mediation," it cannot
be made part of a larger, universal, symbolic medium. For this reason, we can acquire
a sense of the dignity of another's fantasy only by assuming a kind of distance toward
our own, by experiencing the ultimate contingency of fantasy as such, by apprehending
it as the way everyone, in a manner proper to each, conceals the impasse of his
desire. The dignity of a fantasy consists in its very "illusionary," fragile, helpless
character. (Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture (October Books, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 156-157.)

What Zizek calls the "fantasy space" is not simply a floating mass of images, but
"the way a person organizes his universe of meaning in a way absolutely particular to
him."

The Enlightenment had contrasted real perception and memory with fantasy, and had
taken myths to be but the collective fantasies of a people. But anthropologists today
hold that a myth must be seen as a map of the environment. It is a diagram using general
categories to link together classes of things in particular ways, a way to organize the
disparate things of the environment in a meaningful pattern. A myth is a collective
symbolic structure shared by the members of a community.

But there is always a gap between the general categories used in the myth and the
concrete and particular environment in which any individual lives and acts. Shamans and
healers work to integrate individuals into the understanding of the community and into
the community by dramatically reenacting the great mythic conflicts and victories in the
bodies of their clients.

Some studies by Claude LÚvi-Strauss had particular influence on Jacques Lacan, and
thus on Zizek. It happens that two societies, and two myths, enter into contact. The
Islam of the Arab invaders and the old Zoroastrianism of the Persians. The white
mythology of priests and missionaries and the old African mythologies of enslaved
peoples in Mississippi, in Brazil, in Haiti. Now there is a gap between two competing
mythologies.

It is in this in-between zone, where the two cultures and mythical systems
imperfectly overlap, that the medicine men, faith healers, revival meeting preachers,
and voodoo priestesses work. They work to bridge the gap between the universal
categories of the myths and the concrete experience of the people. They interpret the
enslavement and deportation from Africa to Brazil, Haiti, and Mississippi in terms of
the deportation and enslavement of the Jews in Egypt. They identify the triumphant
white-skinned saints set up in the altars of Catholicism, St George and St James, with
Ogun and Olodum, African gods of thunder and bloodshed.

They work piecemeal, rather like jurisprudence works. For lawyers and judges do not
simply have available the universal laws to apply to particular cases. There are always
new cases, new crimes, white collar crimes, Internet crimes, and cases for which there
are no laws. Lawyers and judges work with cases, individual cases, and connect them with
previous cases, working piecemeal. Similarly, medicine men, healers, and Voodoo
priestesses do not all subscribe to a common Creed and Confession. They deal with
concrete cases, with individuals who come to them because they are at their wits' end,
because the ordinary medical doctors have no cure for their sickness. The healers, and
Voodoo priestesses work by "bricolage," that is, by tinkering with the system, using
parts of the Christian mythology and parts of the Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make
sense of what is happening in this individual. They have to invent, to fill in the gaps,
to work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and sacraments.

Anthropologists, studying the biographies of shamans, healers, Voodoo priestesses,
found that typically they had undergone some severe crisis in their own lives. They had
fallen into deep depressions, had fallen prey to strange sicknesses, had suffered
physical and nervous collapse. Do we have to simply identify them as neurotics and
psychotics? Or should we rather say that neurotics and psychotics have shamans,
witchdoctors, Voodoo priestesses inside them--or that they are shamans, witchdoctors,
Voodoo priestesses occupied only with themselves? That their mental productions have all
the characteristics of a myth, save one: they are myths concocted by the shaman,
witchdoctor, Voodoo priestess within them? Thus Jacques Lacan called the fantasy systems
of neurotics and psychotics private myths.

Individuals in our societies use categories and symbols from those that the culture
has selected and fitted together in its discourse, visions, and enterprises to make
sense of their environment. But it happens that an individual finds that the public
symbolic system of his culture and community either has internal flaws, or that it does
not adequately fit his own environment. Like a shaman, witchdoctor, Voodoo priestess,
his fantasy uses bits and pieces wherever he finds him to fill in the gaps, elaborating
his private myth.

Daniel Paul Schreber, a brilliant and vastly learned jurist, became Presiding Judge
of the Saxon High Court of Appeals at the exceptionally young age of 40. His position
laid upon him the most difficult and consequential cases, and the promotion itself put
unusual expectations on him. Schreber began to suffer from tension, sleepless nights,
worries, and obsessive ideas. Finally he collapsed, and was interned in a private
psychiatric clinic, under the renowned Dr Flechsig. In the clinic Schreber was obsessed
with hallucinations and delirium, and also became physically nonfunctional, catatonic
and incontinent. in the Sonnenstein mental asylum, Schreber was isolated from the
rational community. He was given treatments, such as rest, isolation from the concerns
of the legal profession and from business and family matters, some medications aimed at
calming his hypertension, at inducing sleep, hot baths. Professor Flechsig contemplated
castration, which he practiced on a number of inmates in order to reduce their obsession
with sexual matters. After six years, judging himself virtually recovered, Schreber
determined to argue for his release. He wrote a full account of his illness, and of his
gradual recovery of health, in order to win release from the court. The legal and
medical authorities reported that while Schreber was still suffering from numerous
hallucinations and delirious beliefs, he was competent to manage his own life outside
the asylum, in the terms in which such competency was defined by the laws. Schreber was
released, and in 1903 published the account he had written for the court, his Memoirs
of My Nervous Illness. But five years later had another collapse. This time he
remained interned in an asylum until his death in 1911.

Schreber's book attracted the attention of Freud, who wrote a very important study of
it. Studying the Schreber case served Freud to bring into his science important new
directions and theories. Schreber is manifestly paranoid, Freud wrote: See how obsessed
he is with Flechsig, with Flechsig's every word, with Flechsig's intentions in regard to
him. Schreber hallucinates having anal sex with God, who is, as every Jew knows, male, a
Father; Schreber, Freud concluded, is a repressed homosexual. Is not then repressed
homosexuality the true cause of all paranoia? Were Schreber still alive, psychoanalytic
treatment would consist in bringing him to see that: to see under the central fantasy of
sex with God his own repressed homosexual longing. Schreber's Memoires continue
to figure as one of the most important documents of psychosis studied in psychoanalytic
training institutions. It is the richest, most vivid, most intense, and more intricate
account psychiatry has of the inner world of a psychotic. Jacques Lacan wrote his
dissertation on this case.

Schreber explains how his nervous system became hypersensitive to the point that he
registered like intense electrical shocks the most minute shifts in the environment. He
no longer felt in control of his body; instead his body was activated by radiations
coming from the outside. Vibrations off things, cosmic rays, divine rays continually
struck his nervous system, with charges of energy, agitating or paralyzing his body with
their contradictory forces. He was a puppet agitated by superhuman and monstrous forces.
He also felt all the voices outside were badgering him; the creaking of branches in the
wind, the murmurs and cries of birds registered on his nervous system insistently, such
that he felt continually forced to decode them and answer them--like an insomniac who
hears a dripping faucet, and cannot drive it out of his mind, cannot help parsing it as
a morse code message: drip, drip, drip-drip, drip drip, drip-drip-drip... Everything
spoke to him, in a fundamental language, the Grundsprache, more archaic and
primitive than the forms of German, French, or Polish. This being prey to cosmic and
divine rays, being badgered continually by all the voices of nature, forced to try to
give meaning to these messages that continually bombarded them, made his life an
excruciating torment. Schreber also felt his own body metamorphosing. His chest was
swelling, his thighs, his buttocks; he was loosing his virility, he was becoming female,
he was being altered by a God who was attached to him, who found his ass irresistible,
who was sodomizing him. He felt there was something depraved and loutish in God, who
could not leave him alone, could not leave his genitals and anus alone. He felt himself
become pregnant with offspring who would constitute a new, redeemed race.

Schreber set out to describe as carefully, as intricately as possible the environment
as he experienced it in the months and years of his nervous illness, the reactions he
felt in his body, the bodily changes he felt and the metamorphosis, the devirilization
and feminization he experienced. He pursued this task with all the rigor and commitment
to truthfulness of a high court judge. He found his experience not describable in the
vocabulary of the current academic psychology and physiology. With his great erudition
and intelligence, he often had to contrive new terms to describe the way his
sensibility, his nervous system, and his glandular and motor system were functioning. To
make his environment as he truthfully experienced it intelligible, he had to invoke
metaphysical notions. He found the Christianity of his own education and century
inadequate to explain the years of his plight, when he found himself not in the hands of
a benevolent and providential God, but a plaything of superhuman forces in conflict. He
invoked images and concepts from ancient Zoroastrianism, which he did not invoke as a
sort of belief, but rather worked hard and scrupulously to adjust to the concrete
experiences of things and of his own body and nervous system as he immediately
experienced them. He explained that he was incarcerated in the asylum because Dr
Flechsig lusted after his wife, and that Dr Flechsig was committing soul murder on him.

Schreber certainly was a sick man. He had suffered a collapse, due most likely to the
piled up stress of being lifted to the highest position in the legal system at so young
an age, as well as stress over the difficult and important legal judgements he had to
make in his chair. No doubt there were a complex of physical effects of this stress and
this collapse, including insomnia, bad digestion, biochemical imbalances, nervous
hypersensitivity. Schreber was faced with alienation from his own body, from its normal
functions, as well as alienation from his colleagues, his family, his profession, from
contact with the outside world. He, who had wielded enormous power as a judge of the
Supreme Court, was now subjected to the tyrannical rule of the asylum, and the proud and
jealous figure of Doctor Flechsig. Highly intelligent, preoccupied with his own
predicament, Schreber clearly saw how much the language of psychiatry and neurology
failed to explain his state or remedy it. His Memoirs of My Nervous Illness was a
vast undertaking to make sense of his state, his symptoms, the progress of his collapse
and the stages of recovery. But was what he wrote anything but a private myth?

Daniel Paul Schreber was perceived as mad by his wife, his colleagues in law, by
Doctor Flechsig. That, as he wrote, his body was activated by cosmic and divine rays was
not true, and not exactly false, but neither verifiable nor falsifiable: gratuitous
nonsense. They could only think that the birds in the asylum garden are just twittering
to themselves as they pass; they are not addressing occult messages to Schreber and
demanding he decode them and respond to them. They could not see that Schreber was
turning into a woman, and could not seriously entertain the possibility that he was not
really going to become pregnant as a result of anal intercourse with God.

What can be true is a statement that can integrated into the common discourse.
Statements can be true, and first meaningful, only in the discourse of an established
community that determines what could count as observations, what standards of accuracy
in determining observations are possible, how the words of common language are
restricted and refined for use in different scientific disciplines and practical or
technological uses, what could count as an argument in logic, in physics, in history, in
literary criticism or in Biblical scholarship, in economics, in penology, jurisprudence
and military strategy. Truth requires a community with institutions, which set up and
finance laboratories and research teams to gather information and observations according
to community standards of accuracy and repeatability, institutions which establish what
counts as argument and what counts as evidence, institutions which determine the
grammatical and rhetorical forms in which scientific or technological research is to be
reported and conclusions and legislation formulated. Truth presupposes institutions
which select and train researchers, train people in the paradigms of what is established
as pieces of successful research, train them to repeat them and apply them to batches of
other material selected by institutional criteria, and certifies and evaluates the
researchers and technicians. It presupposes institutions which select what research is
to be published, and how it is to be judged. These institutions recruit and train their
members and are financed and controlled by institutions that regulate the training and
the command posts by which the established community monopolizes and elaborates the
agencies of coercive power.

Aristotle has delegated to us the notion that truth is a property of judgments, a
characteristic--of adequation--that inheres in a statement as its own property. But the
establishment of truth is not at all the work of a solitary thinker who simply inspects
the intrinsic properties of statements taken one by one. Every truth is an established
truth, the truth of a certain institution or institutional complex. And every
institution institutes or establishes a truth.

But every system of definitions, methods, and institutions that makes it possible for
a community to agree what statements are true, also excludes much, not only as false,
but as not making sense. What is not formulated in the instituted grammar of English, of
scientific statement, of logical statements, does not make sense to that community. Thus
to say that when someone turns on the switch and his computer lights up, that is because
Wotan or Zeus breathe life into it is not something that we claim to be false, that our
science of computer technology and electrical engineering can prove to be false. It is
instead something that is nonsense, that does not make sense in the vocabulary and
grammar of computer technology and electrical engineering.

In every community where there is a common language and grammar, and institutions to
promote knowledge, there are also people whose sayings and behavior are categorized as
not making sense. They are perceived as mad.

How does one determine that an individual is mad? Is it by his behavior and his
speech? Are there certain identifiable acts which would decisively mark one as mad?
Would they be acts totally inappropriate, unadapted to the situation? How does one
determine that his discourse really is mad? Is it a certain proportion of false
reasonings, invalid syllogisms, that show that one does not know how to think, or that
one's mind is sick? Are there certain beliefs that mark one as insane? How does one
differentiate between beliefs that are false and those that are mad? Believing the earth
is flat, after Columbus's voyage? Believing in Zoroastrian gods in Germany in the
nineteenth century? Believing that it is possible to give birth without having been
inseminated by a human male? Believing in miracles? Believing that God could turn a male
into a woman and impregnate her? Or is it a certain way of speaking, a certain grammar
or rhetoric? Not speaking logically, not speaking in syllogisms? Speaking in rhythm or
rime, or in a singsong manner, like chanting instead of arguing?

The perception that some people are crazy is part of the history of thought, and
madness requires a historical definition. Madness means not making sense--means saying
what doesn't have to be taken seriously. But this depends entirely on how a given
culture defines sense and seriousness; the definitions have varied widely through
history. What is called insane denotes that which must not be thought. Madness is a
concept that fixes limits; the frontiers of madness define what is "other." A mad
person is someone whose voice society doesn't want to listen to, whose behavior is
intolerable, who ought to be suppressed. Different societies use different definitions
of what constitutes madness (that is, of what does not make sense). But no definition
is less provincial than any other. Part of the outrage over the practice in the Soviet
Union of locking up political dissenters in insane asylums is misplaced, in that it
holds not only that doing so is wicked (which is true) but that doing so is a
fraudulent use of the concept of mental illness; it is assumed that there is a
universal, correct, scientific standard of sanity (the one enforced in the mental
health policies of, say, the United States, England, and Sweden, rather than the one
enforced in those of a country like Morocco.) This is simply not true. In every
society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary--are, in the largest
sense, political. (Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn ()

We know that in point of fact Schreber's wife did commit Schreber, and that she
worshipped Dr Flechsig, and that Flechsig took advantage of his adulation to obtain
sexual favors from her. We also know that Flechsig had very real economic and political
motives to discredit Schreber, who, as a distinguished judge and very learned man, could
have done serious harm to Flechsig's reputation as a psychiatrist and of his
money-making private clinic. A photograph shows Flechsig, in frock coat and with great
patriarchal beard, seated at a huge oak desk, and on the wall behind him, like a cosmic
map of his territory, a huge picture of the human brain. We know that the established
Protestant Christian churches have a lot at stake in discrediting all the old pagan
religions, as well as all new age religions.

Fantasy uses symbols from those that the culture has selected and fitted together in
its discourse, visions, and enterprises. An individual finds that the symbolic order
either has internal flaws or that it does not adequately fit his own environment. The
symbols he devises, Zizek says, to cover over the gap, will then be "always particular."
They cannot be made part of a larger, universal, symbolic medium." "His fantasy [is]
that part of him that we can be sure we can never share."

We can never share Schreber's fantasy of being sodomized by God and turning into a
woman because this fantasy was shaped to express what was happening to Schreber's body,
and which Schreber found he could not account for in our common language of physiology,
neurology, and medical pathology. We, for our part, have devised that common language of
physiology, neurology, and medical pathology to formulate what we experience in our
bodies.

But does not each of us have something of the problem Schreber had? The common
language of physiology, neurology, psychology, reason, utility, practical action--the
meaning-system of our culture--has to be applied to our own bodies, environment, and
predicament in order to function, in order to enable us to make sense of our bodies and
our environments. But the meaning system, the categories, are general, while we are
individuals. There is a gap; each one has to fill in, with terms, with symbols, this
gap. Each of us has a fantasy space; each of us elaborates a private myth.

Fantasy, Zizek says, not only in Schreber's case but in ours, is intrinsically bound
to the sensual impulses of one's own body. It is especially with regard to what we find
gives us pleasure, what gives us a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, what elicits
and stimulates our desires, that the meaning-system of the culture is wanting. It is
especially with regard to our own most bodily cravings and carnal desires that we
elaborate our own fantasy, our own private myth. "To use Kant's terms: we do not respect
the other on account of the universal moral law inhabiting every one of us, but on
account of his utmost `pathological' kernel, on account of the absolutely particular way
every one of us `dreams his world,' organizes his enjoyment."

The fundamental fantasy formed in this space is, Zizek says, illusionary, fragile,
and helpless. It is the "`divine details' (Vladimir Nabakov) around which all his
enjoyment is crystallized." It is the way "everyone, in a manner proper to each,
conceals the impasse of his desire." The insatiable, infinite, desire there is in human
sensuality is unsatisfiable, and can persist only in having this inevitable
unsatisfaction concealed from itself.

Philosophy since Aristotle has distinguished between contentment and happiness. The
satisfaction of needs, the acquisition and absorption of a content to fill up that
emptiness inside produced by the consumption of bodily fuel and by evaporation and
secretion of liquids, results in contentment. Contentment, simmering over the content
assimilated, is a torpid and inert pleasure.

Happiness would be the total, integral, and permanent satisfaction of all desires.
Kant argued that we have no real concept of happiness. We can give this abstract idea of
it, but no thinker has been able to give the concrete formula. None of us, who pursue
happiness really knows, really can say, what this happiness is. Yet no satisfaction of a
need, no contentment, satisfies us; every time we satisfy a need, every time we obtain a
content and feel contented, we long for something further.

Jacques Lacan, and Zizek, state it this way: Happiness is absent; is the absent
object of desire. It is also absent from its concept, absent from our understanding,
unrepresentable.

Yet this desire is desire for satisfaction; it can only exist as a desire that
believes it will be, or can be, satisfied. The irremediable absence of its object is
concealed from it. Desire is essentially illusory; it persists under the illusion that
it knows what it seeks and that what it seeks is obtainable. Our fundamental fantasy,
then, is the way each of us conceals the impasse of our desire. Schreber's fundamental
fantasy of becoming a slut irresistible to God projects his impossible desire for
happiness.

But it is the illusionary, fragile, and helpless character of the fantasy space in
the core of an individual, Zizek says, that gives an individual dignity. It is what
makes an individual not be content with the simple satisfaction of his needs and wants,
not be content with contentment.

For Kant, dignity is the unexchangeable value, the term that is an end without being
at the same time a means for something further. In the reverse way, for Zizek dignity
would be that fantasy space which makes any state of the individual not be the end, be a
means for a further end. It is what makes life not be simply the satisfaction of needs.
This dignity, then, Zizek--like Kant--only defines negatively.

But it is the fantasy space in another that commands our respect. The fundamental
fantasy of another is that which we cannot share. Bound intrinsically to the sensual
impulses of his or her body, this fantasy fills in a gap in the meaning-system of the
environment in an utterly singular way.

By acquiring some distance from our own fundamental fantasy, Zizek says, we recognize
the contingency of the manner in which we organize our universe of meaning, and its
impotence to really incorporate the other into it.

This conception Zizek turns into a very radical critique of psychoanalytic practice:

But is not the very aim of the psychoanalytic process to shake the foundations of
the analysand's fundamental fantasy, i.e., to bring about the "subjective destitution"
by which the subject acquires a sort of distance toward his fundamental fantasy as the
last support of his (symbolic) reality? Is not the psychoanalytic process itself,
then, a refined and therefore all the more cruel method of humiliation, of removing
the very ground beneath the subject's feet, of forcing him to experience the utter
nullity of those "divine details" around which all his enjoyment is crystallized?

Psychoanalysis works to expose Schreber's conviction that he was becoming a woman
with an ass irresistible to God as a mere fantasy with no basis in reality. It works to
make this one face the fact that he is in reality not a beloved child of God, that he is
really the child of this father and this mother and is not a poor lost orphan, that she
is not a budding genius, that she is not or a sexual tigress, that he is a shell-shocked
solder and not a bird. Psychoanalysis is disrespect itself, the most far-reaching,
deepest and most cruel humiliation.

Marriage turned into a shitstorm [a man I met once years ago wrote me] and I shut
down for some five months--probably a nervous breakdown. Wife left yesterday. I could
no longer take being a battered husband anymore. (The reason that I accepted her
battering was because of the predator animals in me. My upper body, despite this
illness,... can surge and irrupt into tremendous force and strength, with a fierceness
in my eye that has my wife convinced--without any reason except for said
fierceness--that the only difference between her and Nicole Brown Simpson is that
Nicole is dead and she isn't yet. I have animals in me, the stallion as well as
the plowshare horse (my legs) the white crane, the great blue heron, and a multitude
of underwater aliens, that will tolerate abuse for the sake of love. But then there
are others. A year and a half ago I showcased each animal in turn to her. It is not
pretty to see my hands when the unhuman in me irrupts. The back of them become sets of
granite phone cords, the fingers wolverine claws cocked. Her rageaholism kept getting
worse and took me down too much for too long. I tried to get her to seek to manage it,
but she became violent.... I become explosive (my fault). I told her to take her best
shot. She took five. When she grabbed my jaw for the second time (the fifth
shot)--with great force--I demonstrated a simple fact, viz., that I took the hand put
her around took her arm up her back with my thumb on her wrist in such a way that if I
wanted to she would have a three-way compound fracture of her wrist and did she now
understand that violence and abuse is unacceptable in this house. She did not. I
released her. What transpired when the Police Officers arrived three different times
has still left me quizzical. I think I shall give you the same quiz I just gave
myself. This quiz is: What animal was I with the police officers interrogating us and
I on the verge of being jailed?

Despite numerous afflictions throughout my life, nothing yet has taken be down,
nothing has taken me out. People seem to be amazed at this. "Why do you do on?" "Your
life is not worth living." Et cet, et cet. Since I was born, as if it were a matter of
any significance, I have pretty much known nothing but toil and trouble, suffering and
sorrow. I was never touched with love as a baby; somewhat despised and resented. I had
no reason to speak until I was 3 or 4, when I said "May I please have a glass of
homogenized milk?" I was until then considered a "slow."

We lived at the southwestern edge of Ft Lauderdale, Florida just east of the
Everglades. I spent my boyhood in the marshlands and rivers that ran into the
Everglades. I did not go home much, since my father was a very cruel, mean drunk who
was genuinely out to take me out. He delighted in his cruelty and enjoyed an impunity
that he delighted in even more. I spent the years from 7 to 17 outlasting him--he with
a .38 caliber S&W PS somewhere in the house (I never knew from one time to the next
where); I with my cunning and endurance. I ran away from home at 17, never graduating
from HS, never getting a GED. My last 2-3 years at my parents house I spent
bodybuilding. To the point where I squatted (at 172 lbs.) 535 lbs. and won my weight
division on my HS football team.

In circuses an elephant is tied to a rung with a string, not understanding (out of
love) that it has the strength to not only rip the string but to bring the whole
circus down. Likewise, I was strong enough to paint the walls with my emaciated father
(who would start drinking my 7:00 AM, after his morning dry heaves six feet away from
me while I was eating the breakfast I had prepared for myself--I was doing all my own
cooking, laundry, etc. by age 14), but all I wanted was his love. And he would try to
take me out. Just because, he hated me. Hated me for being more intelligent than him
(not hard to do); being stronger and more athletic than him (not hard to do), etc.

Let me just say, though somewhat impaired, no one--I mean no one--dares fuck with
me. I has been that way since I was in first grade. A bully tried to pick on me (I was
very slight of build) but he found that he was picking on something wild, something
unhuman and untamed who did not know how humans fought, could not fathom why
humans fought and who only knew one way to fight--to the death if necessary. Otherwise
one simply does not fight. The bully saw this wild thing emerge in my body,
scared but with a fierceness in my eyes, with me not even understanding the shiftings
and irruptions of power in my body (my upper arms, when I go into wolverine, assume 3"
more mass each, while my chest expands about 5", with my hands shaped like those long
steel-spike claws of the wolverine [ah, my most beloved of all my animals, my
wolverine, my benefactor and protector of all my other animals; he is always around,
always protecting all of us, such a beautiful, glorious animal--he even shows up on an
MRI of my cerebellum just above it]} Thus the fight would be over before it began.
Been that way ever since. Except now I carry a perfsev on me the size of a polar bears
claw and sharp as a razor.

Although I am devoutly heterosexual (while nonetheless being a conscientious
objector in the "gender wars"--think of me as a Lesbian trapped in a male body and you
will understand me), as a young adolescent, I would, rather than go home, go across
the street to a thirty-something male pedophile who would sometimes wish to molest me.
I never ratted on him, finding him a very respectful, gracious man who had his needs
in a society that didn't allow them. He was never rough with me. Never anything but
gracious. But he was reviled by the community. I was asked to speak up. I did
not.

When I was an adolescent a great she turtle had come in too close to feed on an
orgy of some 3,000 squid I was in the middle of witnessing to. She was very sad, very
tired, needed help. She was near a pier and imperiled and knew it. She let me ride on
top of her in a loving gesture, an interspecies piece of steerage. We got out past the
first reef, free of the freaks on the pier (I used to play interference against them
with the big fish, the sharks and the 'cudas), out near the second reef, where she
felt safe I guess, because then she scooted out and down at amazing velocity. She
lives in me, in my sadness and loneliness. I was deeply honored by her and will always
remember her. Tarpons I deeply honor, refusing all my life to ever catch one (since
they simply fight to the death and their jaws are structured like
bonefishes'--intricate layers upon layers of silvery bones, always gill-like in
structure.

A mongoose lives just below my neck on the right. An otter on top of my head. Bats
in the belfry--that is my head, of course. Except when it is empty, just emptiness,
just the open. My neck is a king cobra; my legs are horses (I cannot and will not
claim thoroughbred here); each of my ankles have been shattered over 700 times, and I
asked last year if I could have then reconstructed with pins and rods an other bones
from my body but the specialist says it is too late. So I fall down a lot. The odd
thing about this is, though, I have somehow managed to learn the trick of not feeling
any pain--even though it should lay me out for two weeks. I cannot do this with any
other pain in my body, which is, to put it bluntly, nothing but ebbs and flows of pain
throughout. (The medical profession describes my illness as a "pain that knows no
boundaries" and a pain more painful than terminal cancer.)

I did not fabricate any of my animals. They came to me, unwanted, uninvited; but
now much needed. They came to me! Just a few months ago a new animal came to me.
Startled me. We had been getting to know each other in my trances; he coming up to me
showing me his ways. Finally he took me into his confidence and, in a trance, let me
become him. I have, in real life, always known him so well. He is the great Mako
shark. About 800 lbs. It took maybe a year of him coming to me in my trances and
dreams to show me and let me become him. Then one night, at 2:00 am, out of the blue,
when I was in more pain than this human could bear, the Wolverine took over, growling,
stalking, killer, fearless--looking for what is hurting the zoological garde; then the
Bengal Tiger (a recent addition of my zoological gardens--6 months ago) took me over,
tossing me about like a ragdoll. Such power! Such immense power! My hands in a weird
open fist with fingers curled up, arms striking out and quickly back in after doing a
three-fold set of circles in front of my chest. Then the Wolverine and the Tiger both
took over and I became so powerful, so able to withstand the pain, enjoying the
power, watching with fascination in the mirror my body change into unhuman shapes.

Respect is too weak a word to name what we feel before this man, when these extracts
from his letter--a man for some years now suffering ever growing pain from an incurable
degenerative nervous disease--a letter from a man who, in unending pain is dying--give
us some insight into what Zizek called his fantasy space. Even awe is too weak a word.

What is also too weak is Zizek's account of the fantasy space and of the respect it
imposes.

1. Zizek conceives of fantasies as a bricolage of symbols which are fitted into flaws
and inconsistencies of the symbolic system of the culture in which one finds oneself. It
is because someone's fantasies are formed by bricolage that they are "that part of him
that we can be sure we can never share." What we share with him is the symbolic system
that prevails in our cultural zone, and his fantasies are "`make-believe' masking a
flaw, an inconsistency in the symbolic order."

But must we not envision symbols not only statically, as pieces of a system, but
dynamically in their activity of formulating, shaping, and intensifying one's thoughts
and one's feelings? Nietzsche envisioned value terms in a new way, not as designations
of properties of things nor as terms that function to compare and rank things, but as
confirmations and intensifications of surges of inner feeling. It is in exclamations:
How good I feel! How healthy I am! How real I feel! How beautiful I am! that these terms
receive their sense. One says "How healthy I am! because one feels it, and in saying it
one feels still more healthy. To feel healthy is not to have the essentially negative
notion of no-debility, no-sickness that we shape from the doctor's examination or from
our own amateur-doctor's examination of ourselves, but to feel exultant energies to
burn. It is once we have this positive, affirmative, confirmative sense of health from
within that we can recognize it in others.

Do not the images and scripts of many of our fantasies function in the same way--not
only and not always to concoct figures of ourselves that fit into the gaps in the
symbolic order that prevails about us, but to confirm, consecrate, and intensify the
surges of our own strong and ecstatic feelings? If these inner figures of ourselves are
also figures of heroes depicted in our culture, that is not because the existing
symbolic system determines the place, function, and contours of every term within it,
but because our feelings surge with the strong feelings of others.

Schreber, in naming his ass a solar anus intensifies his sense of its radiant
seductiveness. George Bataille was obsessed with the notion of a third eye, opening on
top of his head to look directly into the sun. These are not terms and images that get
their sense from the context, but images that radiate fathomless depths and resources of
significance. And this man--what a word Wolverine is for him! Not simply a makeshift to
fill in a gap in a meaning-system; instead a word sulfurous and snarling, a word upon
being invoked that becomes incarnate in his swelling chest, his steel-spike claws.

2. A major defect in Zizek's account is the way the "pathological kernel", the
sensuous impulses, is conceived negatively. Zizek conceives sensuality as desire, which
would terminate in enjoyment, but is insatiable and doomed to an impasse, and therefore
the fantasy that channels it is illusionary and helpless. Behind this Lacanian
conception is the KojÚvian notion--but also the major theme of Western philosophy--that
a living organism is a material system which opens to its environment because of an
inner emptiness--a lack, a hunger, a thirst--and moves with the force of emotion in
order to seize upon the substance that would satisfy that need. If need feeds upon
itself and becomes insatiable, becomes "desire," it is because what it seeks gets
enchained to objectives which are always further on, ungraspable and unspecifiable.

But the strength of our emotions does not comes from an exasperation of the inner
emptiness of lack and need. Hungers and thirst do not arise only because the organism is
porous, do not arise only from evaporation and leakage. It is the plenum of the organism
which generates excess force that has to be discharged that activates an organism and
produces superficial and intermittent lacks and needs. The strong emotions arise from
excess energies which thrust our sensibility beyond the environment that surrounds the
foetus and the infant as a nutritive medium, upon an environment which exceeds
apprehension and comprehension, is tragic or comic. The primary and strong emotions are
laughter and tears, blessing and cursing. The strong impulses of life actively seek out
the surprising, the bungling, the nonfunctional, and the absurdity of a system where
everything works, and blesses it with its peals of laughter. They seek out the corpse of
the fallen hero, of the hummingbird fallen from poisoned skies, to preserve them with
one's grief and tears. Laughter and tears, blessings and cursings are the strong
emotions that drive us to discharge the excesses of energies in our healthy organisms
upon a world full of sound and fury signifying nothing, a world of the free forces of
nature, the sparkling of flowering fields and dunes of ice crystals, the shimmering of
the winds and the wrath of storms. These emotions do not seek to terminate in a
happiness indefinitely deferred. They are ecstatic; it is in their very release, the
discharge of the excesses of their energies, that they know exultation.

What imposes respect is the sense of the other as a being affirming itself in its
laughter and tears, its blessings and cursing. This respect is first the consideration
that catches sight of the space in which the emotions of another extend.

The insulted honor of the peasant, the grief of a widow--it is bravery and strength
that grieves--the affection of a child for a puppy command our respect. The misery of
the trapped jaguar, the exultation of the young eagle taking to flight, the playfulness
of the wolf cubs command our respect.

And this man--his wolverine rage, fearless and murderous, his Tiger snarl, his great
blue heron vigilance, his peregrine ghostly hovering, his great sea turtle sadness and
loneliness--what oceanic storms are these emotions--commanding more than our respect,
more than our awe.

3. Zizek makes the essential activity at the core of an individual an activity of
elaborating meaning. But our individuality is not constituted by a ceaseless spinning of
an ever-wider spiderweb of referentiality. Zizek does not recognize the implosion of
meaning in sensuality, where individuality is formed in a spiral of pleasure. Our
sensuality is not an intentionality but an involution; it espouses the support and
repose of the ground, sinks into the fathomless depths of the sparkling and dazzling
light, into the decomposition of the hard edges of things in twilight, gets caught up in
the rhythms of colors disengaged from the graspable contours of things, abandons itself
to the hum of the city and the murmur of nature, and looses itself in the beginningless,
endless anonymity of the night. Orgasmic voluptuousness is a collapse of posture,
dismemberment of organs and limbs which glow for themselves, aimless movements of
caresses, transubstantiation of flesh and glands from flexible to ferric and from
compacted hardness to liquefication and vaporization. And this man--is it meaning that
he seeks in his inner zoological garden? Meaning for what--his sickness, the place of
his sickness in what? his life? his destiny? the world? history? Is it not rather
this--this fearful ecstasy: "Then the Wolverine and the Tiger both took over and I
became so powerful, so able to withstand the pain, enjoying the power, watching
with fascination in the mirror my body change into unhuman shapes."

4. For Zizek the fundamental fantasy formed in this space is illusionary, fragile,
and helpless. It is the way "everyone, in a manner proper to each, conceals the impasse
of his desire." The insatiable, infinite, desire there is in human sensuality and
enjoyment is unsatisfiable, and can persist only in having this inevitable
unsatisfaction concealed from itself. Psychoanalysis, which forces the patient to
recognize the illusory and helpless character of the fantasy that nourishes his desire,
is a cruelty that removes the very ground beneath the subject's feet. Then the primary
imperative of psychoanalysis, and of each of us who respects the dignity of another,
must be to avoid violating that illusionary, fragile, and helpless fundamental fantasy.
The means to achieve this is to assume a distance toward the fundamental fantasy that
constitutes our own individuality, recognizing that it is irreducibly contingent, and is
the way we too conceal the impasse of our desire.

Is it true that all the psychoanalyst can do, all that we can do, is to avoid
violating the inner fantasy space of others? Is it not true that in speaking to another
whose individuality is crippled, whose fantasy space is fragile and helpless, we speak
to give him or her the free space of his or her excess energies and strong emotions, to
give him or her his or her own voice, the voice of his or her laughter and tears,
blessing and cursing? To give him the voice to howl his wolverine snarl, his great sea
turtle sadness and loneliness?